Rishi sunak

Tory MPs will likely have three candidates to vote for in Monday’s leadership race: Boris Johnson, Penny Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak. If Johnson runs, gets to the final two and it goes to the Tory membership, then he’s probably be back in No. 10 within days. Polls of Tory members put Boris ahead by a three-to-two margin in a multi-candidate scenario. To stop Johnson getting in the final two, Tory MPs would need to cast their votes tactically to engineer a Sunak-Mordaunt playoff amongst members, in which Sunak would likely win. Why would she be Sunak’s lobby fodder? But all this assumes Penny Mordaunt plays ball. Why would she be Sunak’s

Liz Truss is now prime minister in name only: Jeremy Hunt, her chancellor of the exchequer, now holds power. He has repudiated her tax-cutting mini-Budget in a round of media appearances – his performances being far more convincing than Truss’s graceless eight-minute press conference on Friday. His admission that spending cuts will be needed and that ‘some taxes are going to go up’ to balance the books has injected a much-needed dose of realism. The question on everyone’s lips is: what will Hunt do now? Is he a stalking horse for a new PM (Rishi Sunak being the obvious candidate) or is the former head boy at Charterhouse himself a

There’s not much for the Tories to cheer about at the moment but there was little sign of the blues last night in Leicester Square. Members of Rishi Sunak’s campaign packed out the Londoner Hotel to toast their king over the water with glasses of English sparkling wine. In what his supporters insist was an event long in the diary, MPs, spinners and activists gathered to hear the man himself give a belated thanks to all those who had backed him. Fresh off the back of his Treasury farewell on Wednesday night, Sunak was on his best behaviour, declining the chance to declare vindication at his triumphant rival’s recent woes.

What was supposed to be a recovery moment for the Conservatives instead looks like a collective nervous breakdown. The Prime Minister has been forced to U-turn on her flagship tax plan. Her cabinet is in open rebellion. Tory party conference resembled a civil war. The latest polling suggests the party is heading for electoral extinction. And that’s after just four weeks of Liz Truss’s premiership. ‘I know we have had a series of crises but this one really feels like the worst yet,’ says one seasoned government aide. Some Truss supporters are showing signs of buyer’s remorse. ‘I didn’t know it would be this bad,’ says one MP who backed

Friedrich Nietzsche may not be the most fashionable member of the conservative canon, but doubtless he wouldn’t care much. He knew that one of the main symptoms of a civilisation in decline is ‘herd thinking’. Regardless of the victor, this summer’s Conservative leadership contest has been a case in point for Freud’s narcissism of small differences. None of the candidates have dared deviate from the dogma of Thatcherism. Grant Shapps said it loudest: like Thatcher, he would confront union ‘Luddites’ to save an ailing economy. Liz Truss wants to to ‘crack down’ on trade union ‘militants’ by making it harder for them to call strikes. Truss didn’t even need to name Thatcher

Is the Tory leadership race already over? That’s the narrative among Conservative MPs with two weeks of the leadership contest to go. The Sunak camp dispute this version of events – and tonight they have an endorsement which works in their favour. After several Tory MPs switched their allegiance from Rishi Sunak to Liz Truss, this evening Michael Gove has endorsed the former Chancellor. Writing for the Times, the former Minister for the Cabinet Office has argued Truss’s plans for immediate tax cuts are a ‘holiday from reality’ that would put ‘the stock options of FTSE 100 executives’ before the poorest. He says that Sunak is best placed to prioritise

Judging by the show of hands in the auditorium of the Perth Concert Hall tonight, both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak had a fair bit of work to do to win over Scottish Tories. Many put their hands up to say they hadn’t yet decided who to back when asked by the host Colin Mackay. Mind you, many of them then went on to boo Mackay for asking questions of both candidates that they found annoying. Normally when an audience boos a journalist in Scotland, it’s blamed on the SNP and that party’s dislike of scrutiny. Tonight, though, it was the Conservative party.  Neither candidate has said that much about

Poor Rishi Sunak. Membership polls put him 30 point behind Liz Truss but there’s still three-and-a-half weeks to go in the Tory leadership race. The former Chancellor is being forced to spend his summer traipsing around the country, trapped in some hideous purgatory, waiting for the sweet release of 5 September to halt the seemingly endless number of hustings, debates, interviews and meetings. But it seems the longtime heir apparent is having as much luck online as he is offline. Mr S has done some digging and Sunak has spent more than two-and-a-half times has much as Liz Truss on Facebook adverts, for all the good that it has done

A curious row has exploded in the projectile-packed leadership race. This morning’s Yorkshire Post splashed on the news that Rishi Sunak (a Yorkshire MP) would oppose Tory plans for 1,500 asylum seekers being housed in a disused RAF base in the region, ahead of tonight’s Darlington hustings. Yet, just hours later, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace revealed he had ‘withdrawn’ the offer and insisted such an incendiary move is no longer happening. Wallace told ITV: I have withdrawn the offer to the Home Office for that site. It’s been with them for a number of months. I have obligations to do something else with that site and you know there are

Liz Truss has taken the lead in the Tory leadership race with an agenda that seems radical and ambitious, whereas Rishi Sunak appears to offer only elegantly managed decline. Truss promises instant relief from the rising cost of government; Sunak offers to reverse barely half of his own tax rises – and over the course of the rest of the decade. To promise more, he says, is to sell ‘fairytales’. Truss says a better future is possible with enough vision, ideas and, perhaps most importantly, resolve. Ms Truss came up with a promising idea this week: regional pay boards, so that civil service salaries could be set relative to the

Liz Truss has been rolling out the endorsements this week, and tonight she adds one of the Tory’s most established politicians to her list. Former Health Secretary Sajid Javid has endorsed the Foreign Secretary, praising her ‘willingness to challenge the status quo.’ The endorsement is not wholly surprising; with several polls out in the past few days giving Truss a very comfortable lead amongst Tory members, anyone thinking about the make-up of the next cabinet might feel increasingly inclined to make their support known. The real surprise is in the pointed commentary towards Truss’s competitor Rishi Sunak, whom Javid implies is ‘sleepwalking’ the UK ‘into a big-state, high-tax, low-growth, social